Articles & Devotionals
Soul Sanitizer
If you have tried to purchase hand sanitizer this past week you’ve probably come up empty handed. Hand sanitizer seems to be the liquid gold that everyone wants to have in stock piles and no stores seem to have any. But if you are a child of God you have something far greater – you have soul sanitizer. What is this soul sanitizer made of? Well, in a word, hope.
Remember from our last devotional we said there is a difference in hopefully and hope fully. As saints of God we don’t wishfully desire something good to happen, but we desire and expect our unchanging God to work in our lives for His good. So we hope fully in our Almighty Father. Once we hope in this way we begin to see the effects of this hope in our lives. We begin to see hope purify our lives. Notice what John tells us.
1 John 3:3
“And everyone who has this hope fixed on Him purifies himself, just as He is pure.”
The specific hope that John is referring to is the Desire and Expectation of seeing Jesus, being with Him and being like Him. When we understand that our personal future is completely bound up in Christ, we strive to make purity a habit right now in our everyday lives. This hope stirs us to purify ourselves from selfishness, worldly lusts, mental filthiness and anything else that would prevent us from being with Christ.
This hope purifies by raising our mind from carnal things to spiritual things and by fixing our eyes on our holy, undefiled Savior. Not that we alone can purify ourselves. Christ’s blood purifies us (1 John 1:7) along with the continual working of the Holy Spirit (1Peter 1:2). But we have a part, in that the more we see Him the more we seek to be like Him and strive for His purity.
Tony Reinke said it much better than I can.
“The point of 1 John 3:2–3 is brilliantly succinct. Our entire future is bound up with Christ. When we see our future in Him, he becomes for us the model of our holiness, the goal of our holiness, the end of our holiness, and the motivation for our holiness.
“You can’t put your hope in all that God promises to be for us in Christ and live like everyone else who depends on money, security, and prestige for contentment.” No, we cannot, because our future is bound up with Christ. One day we shall see him face to face to be fully glorified. This future hope does not make us lazy; this future hope propels us to purity.” (Hope that Purifies)
So in the midst of this crisis we need to ask ourselves how much soul sanitizer are we using? Do we find ourselves more dependent on physical things to give us our security or spiritual things?
I’ll close with this thought…
Maybe this week you’ve found it hard to see beyond the moment, or a moment got the best of you and all the selfishness crept back in. Don’t fret just take a moment and look at Jesus. See His love for you. See His devotion to you. See His comfort and care about you. Now go live the next moment like that.
In God’s love,
Adam
